In Memoriam pays tribute to those who have left this world, and the songs they left us to remember them by.
It’s five years today since the death of Peter Green, the architect of the initial blues-facing iteration of Fleetwood Mac. A reputable and reliable guitarist, he was the one the original bluesmen looked up to, holding his play in greater regard than some lesser “gods” as, say, Eric Clapton. Albert King, that giant of U.S. electric blues said of him “He has the sweetest tone I ever heard; he was the only one who gave me the cold sweats.” For five years, as the ’60s blossomed into the ’70’, he was the man.
When Clapton left behind John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers to form Cream in 1966, this left a sizeable hole. It was Green, a very quiet and somewhat reserved Londoner, still only 19 years old, who was drafted in, based on his burgeoning reputation. His time with Mayall was short, around a year, and he contributed a couple of compositions to the album released during that period, A Hard Road. One of these, “The Supernatural,” displayed his early knack for crafting an instrumental.
In 1967, he jumped ship to form his own band, naming them after the rhythm section rather than himself, drummer Mick Fleetwood and bassist John “Mac” McVie, each also graduates of the Mayall finishing school for British blues-rockers. It seems he felt Mayall, the Godfather of British Blues, was straying too far from blues orthodoxy. The fourth member was Jeremy Spencer, an adept practitioner of the Elmore James style of slide guitar. Both Green and Spencer wrote, each contributing to their first eponymous album, with Green contributing 5 to Spencers 3, the rest bulked out by covers.
By second album, Mr Wonderful, Green had begun to hit his stride, and contributed a greater proportion, mainly co-writes with C.G. Adams, aka Clifford Davis, the band’s manager, later to be seen as somewhat a malign influence. However, the critics were cooler in their response, there needing to be a greater step-up. That duly came, coinciding with the band becoming a five-piece, recruiting a third guitarist, in Danny Kirwan. Singles were a bigger thing than albums back in those days, and it was with a bevy of non-album releases that the band really hit pay-dirt. Beginning with “Black Magic Woman” and a relatively lowly UK chart position of 37 in 1968, the quintet moved swiftly forward, onward and upward. Apart from the cover, “Need Your Love So Bad,” which came next, it was all Green originals paving the way. This culminated with the evergreen and mercurial “Albatross” followed by “Man of the World” and “Oh Well,” a #1 and two #2’s, ’68 into ’69. (“Oh Well” was actually the first to dent America, becoming a #55 on Billboard.)
The plot had begun to unravel by the time a further LP release, Then Play On, and it showed Green deferring much of the songwriting to his new recruit, although a further non album single, “The Green Manalishi (with the Two Prong Crown)” came, from Green, in 1970. It is fair to say the title gives some clue as to where his mind was at. Green quit the band, in part initiated by his addled desire that the band donate all and any profit to charity.
His later years were besmirched, possibly the wrong word, by various demons, well documented elsewhere. Although he did regain and, partly, restore his career, if not so much his reputation, it is those classic years that remain his legacy and that we celebrate here. (If you seek the sores and suffering, this is as good a summary as any.)
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